It started from a simple question. Why were we alone, and unliked by many?

And so we spent too many nights sitting at quiet void decks, picking apart the motivations, the cracks of selfishness, weakness and human nature that characterized all our relationships, our friendships, and our friends' friendships. And from these findings we mapped out the web of human relations, and to prove our hypotheses we repeated the experiments, controlled the variables, adjusted our findings until we perfected the method by which these relationships were forged. And then we set out to replicate them, to exploit our findings, to practice this method of charm that would soon garner us many friends, social acceptance, and a smugness at having hoodwinked them all.

We may have been born awkward. But we learnt. And we came to the conclusion that no relationship was special, for all could be replicated - both the joys of shared laughter, and the relief from sorrow that listening and empathy offers. With certain situations, certain reactions could be elicited - there was nothing special or unique about the people offering these things - what was important was belief in the product, belief that the masses inevitably held, belief that we learnt to feign, since we could find so few that offered the spontaneous alternative.

For it was so painful to be lonely. It was so painful, and it still is.

Only now we are old men, ossified in the world that we willed into existence. The mind is no longer agile enough to find the rabbit hole, and all is not well in Wonderland - the Red Queen sits on her throne of bronze, inseparable from the jabberwocky, and the White Queen is nowhere to be found.

In love with the knave of Hearts, she cries, cries, cries over her tarts.